An easy brayer card for the August Pals Blog Hop

Welcome to the Pals Blog Hop for August. This month we are showing off our favorite crafting tools – those Stampin’ Up! tools that we just can’t live without. We hope you enjoy our projects!

You may just be starting the blog hop or may have come from Kelly DeTommaso at Kelly’s Creative Corner on the Pals Hop. If you get off track at any time, the full lineup below will help you move along from blog to blog so you see all of the amazing creations.

This card was born out of the leftovers for my card for the Pals swap at the 2014 Stampin’ Up Convention. I had a bunch of half-inch-wide Whisper White paper strips that I had trimmed off to make 4″ x 5.25″ pieces for the front of my cards, and since there were like 40 of them I didn’t just want to throw them out.

See how great this card is for the lazy brayer-er! No need for carefully blending colors or putting on the different inks in delicate layers! Just load up the brayer with Crushed Curry ink and roll it on one side, then do the same think with Bermuda Bay and Island Indigo.

This card is just full of mistakes: hard lines, splotches, blank spots when I didn’t get the pieces lined up right when I was brayering. Even the fold is a mess, because I totally misjudged where the fold should go and scored in the wrong place and ended up with a rounded half-circle-y effect from three score lines about 1/8″ apart rather than the traditional crisp professional fold that encourages those who see it to admire and buy bone folders. But whatever! Mistakes add character!

Also, I would like to point out that everything that went wrong with this card is not entirely my fault! The comedy of errors continued after I put it in the mailbox, at which point it apparently was rained upon so vigorously that the ink with which the address was written smeared, and had to be deciphered, and consequently it took over a week for this card to travel about 12 miles to its recipient.

Thank you, Kim! After a few of my mess-ups I was getting discouraged and thought, “Well, I’ll just finish this one so I will know what mistakes to fix on the REAL version of this card I’m going to make after.” And then this one ended up looking better than my “perfect” card!

Mistakes? I did not see a one, rather I saw a stunning card. I have a brayer and it intimiates me. I too have mountains of scrap strips. You have totally inspired me to jump in and make some mistakes. I hope my turn out as beautiful. Great job Amanda,

Oh, Amanda, don’t ever feel like your work has mistakes! Our handmade cards are just born from our artistic eye with what we have on hand. I love your card! I just bought a brayer (my first one was showing its use and age from decoupage projects) so I will give this a shot. I too hold onto scraps for just this type of project. TFS

Amanda, your swaps always have such an artistic flair and, apparently, so do your leftover bits! Love how you arranged this card!! You approach your photography in much the same manner. Lovely, sweet Pal!

I hate having leftovers and I never want to throw anything away because I think I might be able to use it for something. So I try to think of some use for them, and make something new out of them…which means I need to use more paper and supplies, and have different leftovers, and then the cycle starts again…